Saturday, June 18, 2016

PANCHO VILLA AND OTHER NUISANCES…

PANCHO VILLA AND OTHER NUISANCES…

It was a typical New Mexico morning, on March 9, 1916.
The small town of Columbus
awoke and people were starting to go about their daily routines…but this was
not going to be a routine day. The American President, Woodrow had
been lending support to Venustiano Carranza, the opposition leader to
Victoriano Huerta whose administration Wilson
had described as a “government of butchers”. Unfortunately,
Carranza proved to be no better than Huerta. Wilson then turned to a rebel leader, a man
named Pancho Villa. Villa was an adopted name. The real name
of this bandit leader was Francisco (Pancho) Villa born José Doroteo Arango
Arámbula, born in Durango Mexico on June 5th,
1878, he was from the peasant, or peon, class…but he had ambition.

It
was that ambition that drove him to team up with another ambitious rebel
leader, Emiliano Zapata. They wanted to keep the rebellion going, but it
was going to take money, power, and guns. Somewhere along the
time-line President Wilson got to thinking that Carranza was on the right track
and that he, Wilson,
no longer needed Pancho Villa…and he dropped his support. This withdrawal
of support for Villa so aggravated Villa that he declared war on the United States.
And that brings us to what Villa did. Pancho Villa stopped a train in Mexico, but
which had 18 Americans on it. He

took them off the train and killed them all.

A
few weeks later, on March 9, in 1916, Villa led an army of about 1,500
guerillas across the border to stage a brutal raid against the small American
town of Columbus, New Mexico. Villa and his men killed 19
people and left the town in flames. Woodrow Wilson called on the US
Army, under General John “Blackjack”
Pershing, to lead 6,000 troopers into Mexico to capture and/or kill the
bandit, Pancho Villa. For two years, Pershing pursued Villa, on
horseback, in automobiles and even the new-fangled airplanes…but he never
caught him.

By
this time Carranza had lost patience with the American Army in his country and
ordered them out. Pershing went on to become the leader of the American
Expeditionary Force(AEF) in World War One. Although he never actually
caught Villa, he did convince him never to attack the United States
again. Pancho Villa retired from banditry and was eventually assassinated
in 1923 while on his way to become the Godfather to a friend’s child.

Fast
forward now to the present. We no longer send expeditionary forces in to
wipe out foreign leaders. We have special operations teams to try to do
the work without actually harming anyone…other than the intended target, that
is. Who might some of these nuisances be? There was Osama Bin
Laden, and we got him. There was Moammar Quaddafi, but his own people got
him. There was Saddam Hussein, and he was hanged by his own
people. Still around is the North Korean Kim Jung Un, the little
fat boy dictator, several people connected with ISIS,
whose names I cannot pronounce, and if we had something other than a spineless
twit in the White House we could get rid of them also.

It
just seems to me that when duty called we had men and women to answer that
call. These were young men and women stepping up and putting their
civilian lives on hold while putting their lives on the line in combat.
Today’s armed forces are being hamstrung by ridiculous rules of engagement
which actually give the enemy the advantage. What good is superior
technology if you cannot use it first. What good is technology if the troopers
don’t understand how to use it, or it’s too bulky to move around
easily? We hear of sorties into areas controlled by ISIS and the bombing of a truck or a building…surgical
strikes they call them. Some of these sorties come back without firing a
missile or dropping a bomb. Maybe we are just a
nuisance factor to ISIS.

While on the subject of nuisances, what about our borders? Are we to
continue to have such porous borders that we no longer resemble a sovereign
nation? If you look at the areas now controlled by ISIS
the borders of those countries seem to have melted away and in their places is
something called the Islamic State. The lesson is very clear, at least to
me…if you have no borders, at least none to speak of, you cannot be considered
as a sovereign nation. You become simply a territory of some name or
another without real meaning and, sometimes, without a real government. A
good example of this, aside from ISIS is Somalia. Although they have
borders of a sort, bandits and pirates operate inside and outside those borders
as if they didn’t exist. There hasn’t been a true, working, government in
Somalia
for several years now.

Nuisances exist in many forms, not the least of which is government
itself. Our country was formed with the idea that government people were
elected for a term or two and then they went home and continued on with their
lives. Serving in Congress was never meant to be a career, and those
making it so seem to have created an elite class completely disconnected from
their constituents. Wake up America, your country needs
you…desperately.